No idea about WPF and WCF, but the others are pretty old, well-established technologies. They show you do exactly the same things that everybody else has been doing for quite some time now.
If I want to hire a good Java programmer, I'd rather hire someone who also knows a bit of Scala, than someone who knows just Java. The Scala guy is more likely to be someone interested in new technologies, and more likely to be aware of new ways of doing stuff.
Leeuwarden doesn't really sound like the center of all programming activity to me. Most jobs I see are in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Den Bosch, Almere, or even Apeldoorn. Not a lot north of that, I'm afraid. I do recall something in Drachten? Beesterzwaag? But I can imagine it's harder to find something good up there.
If nothing else, showing that you have a broader interest than just.NET gives the impression that you're not just in this for the 9-5 but actually have a genuine desire to learn. I would also add that, even while out of work, there are things you can involve yourself in to show potential employers that you weren't just bumming around.
That reminds me of something I forgot to add:
Don't reserve programming just for work, do it also fr play. Especially when unemployed. Join open source projects, for example. Write a blog on programming. These make excellent references.
Also join local user groups for your favourite languages. I don't know how it is in your area, but in my (pretty small) country, there's a user group for Groovy and Grails, there's one for Scala, there's groups for pretty much every other language out there, I presume, and there's a young but really cool cross-language group. They meet roughly every month or every two months, and those are great opportunities to learn more about your language, learn about new frameworks, learn stuff you never even knew existed, and learn about the strengths of other languages. And also to meet people, including potential business contacts and employers.
In programming, there are excellent ways to make a name for yourself.
Amsterdam, Netherland. I guess it's different here than in much of the US. I was unemployed for over a year after the dot-com crash, but I hardly noticed the current recession.
On the other hand, I just googled a bit, and found figures that unemployment in Dutch IT was over 12% last year. So maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe I'm in a different branch of IT? I've been switching jobs quite regularly over the past few years, and have never had trouble finding anything.
There's money in it. And it's not necessarily bad, mind you. I admit Microsoft's suggestion sounds creepily like pretty invasive spying, but I'm toying with ideas to have big screens with advertisements or other messages in some public space, respond to people standing in front of them. Show several items, and zoom in on the one they look or point at, for example. Stop playing a message when the person walks away. Show stuff bigger when they're far away, smaller when they're near. That sort of stuff.
I'm not usually one for advertising, but the company I work for happens to do a lot of different things, and this sounds like something right up their alley.
3 years of work experience isn't bad. If it's good experience, you should be way better off then a starter.
I get the impression that location may actually be the biggest issue. Maybe IT companies cluster together. My guess is that in particular cool, small, innovative start-ups probably prefer to be in hip cities with lots of students and startups.
Every time I hear people claim the job market is slow, I'm thinking: not in Amsterdam (where I live). There's lots of small companies here that care more about whether you know what you're talking about, than about exact responsibilities in your last job. I mean, sure, it matters, but for every job so far, I had to learn at least one new language, and that's been no problem for me so far. And I keep looking for jobs with languages I don't know yet (Scala, Erlang, Clojure), and I keep getting job offers for them. Or maybe my CV (that I really didn't put a lot of effort in) has something that makes it attract recruiters like flied, but I honestly have no idea why. Maybe because I list lots of new, interesting languages?
In any case, my advice is: figure out what kind of company you want to work for, and make yourself attractive to that kind of company. Move to whether those kind of companies are located. Make sure your CV shows the stuff they want to see.
Also, I think it's easier to be a convincing generalist than a convincing specialist there's always someone with more experience than you). So don't do just SQL, or just.Net, or just Linux. Show them you know a bit of everything, and can learn new stuff quickly, and tell in your CV what specific kinds of things are still on your to-learn list.
In my experience, there's plenty of choice. Not all of it great, of course, but there are some real gems passing along every now and then. They just get swamped in job offers for big Java enterprisey stuff. I try to scare them away by mentioning I don't want to work with Java, JSP or Struts, but since my CV contains the word "Java", they still contact me.
Interestingly, they also contact me when they need an Erlang or Python expert, despite the fact that I have no experience in those languages. But my CV says I want to learn them. Really, nobody ever reads CVs. They just do basic pattern matching and assume that's good enough.
My most interesting recent offer was from a company that wanted to switch to Scala. They had no Scala expertise yet, but needed some people wiling to learn and guide the transition. But it was almost an hour commute, partially by train, and I want to go to work by bike. But there's enough choice to be this picky, so the job market isn't exactly slow where I live.
I like your definition. I love working on applications, and I hate dealing with infrastructure. Yet infrastructure always seems to involved somehow. If "cloud" computing will help me to abstract infrastructure away and ignore it, then I'm all for it.
So what exactly is my role in this? Does it mean I don't have to pay my ISP anymore, because now they're working for Google and other content providers?
Or does it mean that I'll keep paying the same, but my connection will be slower because my ISP wishes Google was their customer instead of me?
Well, the Europarliament and various national parliaments have. But it's still not entirely clear to me whether they'll be having any say in this. They should, of course, because much of this treaty goes way beyond established laws, but the EU isn't always as democratic as it should be.
From what I gather (which isn't a lot, mind you), it's not so much optimizing the execution of an algorithm, but changing what the algorithm actually does. In this case: smarter scheduling.
I agree. From what I understand, scheduling has always been an issue for Linux, and no solution was ever good enough to be accepted. I'm glad we're finally seeing a big move forward here.
Jython 2-4 times slower? How do they manage that? JRuby is one of the fastest Ruby implementations around.
I guess that makes Jython a "worst of all worlds" choice. Use regular Python is you want Python, use JRuby or Groovy if you want a dynamic language on the JVM.
Western ways of dealing with groups like Hamas have their own tyrannical tendencies. Maybe it's wiser to figure out non-tyrannical ways of dealing with our local wannabe-tyrants before we try to export our tyranny.
Maybe I don't know enough about JCP's value to Oracle, but it seems to me that Oracle is the kind of company that would happily get rid of other people's input in their product, and then blame it on Apache.
It's certainly true that Microsoft seems a lot less evil now than in the past. They probably learned from the past, were punished a couple of times, and there also seem to be some movements within MS that have a more constructive attitude.
Now we need to do all of those same things with Oracle. (Or just kill them, but I don't know if that's possible.)
Not trolling, but is Java really worth the fight at this point? Years ago it had the promise of the 'programming panacea' but now it's just another programming language.
It's not about the language, it's about the platform. The JVM, and Dalvik's status in that respect.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but then how would they check facebook?
No idea about WPF and WCF, but the others are pretty old, well-established technologies. They show you do exactly the same things that everybody else has been doing for quite some time now.
If I want to hire a good Java programmer, I'd rather hire someone who also knows a bit of Scala, than someone who knows just Java. The Scala guy is more likely to be someone interested in new technologies, and more likely to be aware of new ways of doing stuff.
Why do they have to be young? When I was in middle school, my hero was Einstein.
Exactly. Einstein for me too. Hell, he predicted one of the coolest things ever: Bose-Einstein condensate! How cool is that?
Leeuwarden doesn't really sound like the center of all programming activity to me. Most jobs I see are in Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, Den Bosch, Almere, or even Apeldoorn. Not a lot north of that, I'm afraid. I do recall something in Drachten? Beesterzwaag? But I can imagine it's harder to find something good up there.
If nothing else, showing that you have a broader interest than just .NET gives the impression that you're not just in this for the 9-5 but actually have a genuine desire to learn. I would also add that, even while out of work, there are things you can involve yourself in to show potential employers that you weren't just bumming around.
That reminds me of something I forgot to add:
Don't reserve programming just for work, do it also fr play. Especially when unemployed. Join open source projects, for example. Write a blog on programming. These make excellent references.
Also join local user groups for your favourite languages. I don't know how it is in your area, but in my (pretty small) country, there's a user group for Groovy and Grails, there's one for Scala, there's groups for pretty much every other language out there, I presume, and there's a young but really cool cross-language group. They meet roughly every month or every two months, and those are great opportunities to learn more about your language, learn about new frameworks, learn stuff you never even knew existed, and learn about the strengths of other languages. And also to meet people, including potential business contacts and employers.
In programming, there are excellent ways to make a name for yourself.
.Net is only a platform. Have you looked at F#? That's also something that can show you're looking beyond what you already know.
Amsterdam, Netherland. I guess it's different here than in much of the US. I was unemployed for over a year after the dot-com crash, but I hardly noticed the current recession.
On the other hand, I just googled a bit, and found figures that unemployment in Dutch IT was over 12% last year. So maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe I'm in a different branch of IT? I've been switching jobs quite regularly over the past few years, and have never had trouble finding anything.
He's not terribly young anymore, though. Brian Cox is also too old, but still quite a bit younger than Brian May.
Really, young and famous seems to be pretty rare in science. It's so much easier in music or sports!
There's money in it. And it's not necessarily bad, mind you. I admit Microsoft's suggestion sounds creepily like pretty invasive spying, but I'm toying with ideas to have big screens with advertisements or other messages in some public space, respond to people standing in front of them. Show several items, and zoom in on the one they look or point at, for example. Stop playing a message when the person walks away. Show stuff bigger when they're far away, smaller when they're near. That sort of stuff.
I'm not usually one for advertising, but the company I work for happens to do a lot of different things, and this sounds like something right up their alley.
3 years of work experience isn't bad. If it's good experience, you should be way better off then a starter.
I get the impression that location may actually be the biggest issue. Maybe IT companies cluster together. My guess is that in particular cool, small, innovative start-ups probably prefer to be in hip cities with lots of students and startups.
Every time I hear people claim the job market is slow, I'm thinking: not in Amsterdam (where I live). There's lots of small companies here that care more about whether you know what you're talking about, than about exact responsibilities in your last job. I mean, sure, it matters, but for every job so far, I had to learn at least one new language, and that's been no problem for me so far. And I keep looking for jobs with languages I don't know yet (Scala, Erlang, Clojure), and I keep getting job offers for them. Or maybe my CV (that I really didn't put a lot of effort in) has something that makes it attract recruiters like flied, but I honestly have no idea why. Maybe because I list lots of new, interesting languages?
In any case, my advice is: figure out what kind of company you want to work for, and make yourself attractive to that kind of company. Move to whether those kind of companies are located. Make sure your CV shows the stuff they want to see.
Also, I think it's easier to be a convincing generalist than a convincing specialist there's always someone with more experience than you). So don't do just SQL, or just .Net, or just Linux. Show them you know a bit of everything, and can learn new stuff quickly, and tell in your CV what specific kinds of things are still on your to-learn list.
In my experience, there's plenty of choice. Not all of it great, of course, but there are some real gems passing along every now and then. They just get swamped in job offers for big Java enterprisey stuff. I try to scare them away by mentioning I don't want to work with Java, JSP or Struts, but since my CV contains the word "Java", they still contact me.
Interestingly, they also contact me when they need an Erlang or Python expert, despite the fact that I have no experience in those languages. But my CV says I want to learn them. Really, nobody ever reads CVs. They just do basic pattern matching and assume that's good enough.
My most interesting recent offer was from a company that wanted to switch to Scala. They had no Scala expertise yet, but needed some people wiling to learn and guide the transition. But it was almost an hour commute, partially by train, and I want to go to work by bike. But there's enough choice to be this picky, so the job market isn't exactly slow where I live.
I like your definition. I love working on applications, and I hate dealing with infrastructure. Yet infrastructure always seems to involved somehow. If "cloud" computing will help me to abstract infrastructure away and ignore it, then I'm all for it.
So what exactly is my role in this? Does it mean I don't have to pay my ISP anymore, because now they're working for Google and other content providers?
Or does it mean that I'll keep paying the same, but my connection will be slower because my ISP wishes Google was their customer instead of me?
Well, the Europarliament and various national parliaments have. But it's still not entirely clear to me whether they'll be having any say in this. They should, of course, because much of this treaty goes way beyond established laws, but the EU isn't always as democratic as it should be.
From what I gather (which isn't a lot, mind you), it's not so much optimizing the execution of an algorithm, but changing what the algorithm actually does. In this case: smarter scheduling.
Android: 3Q 2011
Most actual Android devices: Q2 2012, or never.
I agree. From what I understand, scheduling has always been an issue for Linux, and no solution was ever good enough to be accepted. I'm glad we're finally seeing a big move forward here.
Jython 2-4 times slower? How do they manage that? JRuby is one of the fastest Ruby implementations around.
I guess that makes Jython a "worst of all worlds" choice. Use regular Python is you want Python, use JRuby or Groovy if you want a dynamic language on the JVM.
Western ways of dealing with groups like Hamas have their own tyrannical tendencies. Maybe it's wiser to figure out non-tyrannical ways of dealing with our local wannabe-tyrants before we try to export our tyranny.
Maybe I don't know enough about JCP's value to Oracle, but it seems to me that Oracle is the kind of company that would happily get rid of other people's input in their product, and then blame it on Apache.
It's certainly true that Microsoft seems a lot less evil now than in the past. They probably learned from the past, were punished a couple of times, and there also seem to be some movements within MS that have a more constructive attitude.
Now we need to do all of those same things with Oracle. (Or just kill them, but I don't know if that's possible.)
It's too bad that some of the most promising new languages (Scala, Clojure) are JDK based.
I think people are working on CLR (.Net) versions of Scala and Clojure.
Java is also faster than Jython and JRuby. Scala beats Java in some cases, however.
For this specific kind of thing, Microsoft has never been the kind of antagonist that Oracle is.
How short your memory is. Remember when Microsoft tried to destroy Java?
Not trolling, but is Java really worth the fight at this point? Years ago it had the promise of the 'programming panacea' but now it's just another programming language.
It's not about the language, it's about the platform. The JVM, and Dalvik's status in that respect.